Teacher Training
Poetry: A Course of Study - A Creative Workshop for Teachers
This past fall, Terry Hermsen, CLA Director, taught a poetry course to ten middle-school teachers from Genoa Middle School. This course grew out of our 2006 Summer Institute for teachers from Genoa and other Westerville City Schools. The thrust of that workshop was on having teachers do creative writing themselves in order for them to make better use of it in their own classrooms. This class focused on the same principles, with particular emphasis placed on poetry. Each week, the teachers participated in poetry-writing exercises designed not so much for their students, but rather to inspire their appreciation of poetry as an art form.
Again, we were (and always are) operating on the theory that with more experience in creative writing themselves, teachers will be better prepared to create lessons tagged to their particular curricular standards and goals. That was the sense conveyed to us by many of the teachers who participated in the 2006 Summer Institute. Paired with these exercises were readings on the nature of poetry and the conceptual skills it teaches, which can be integrated into the whole of the curriculum.
Finally, they wrote up their experiences and insights, seeking ways to make poetry a more effective part of their classroom and therefore, their students' lives. Participants from this class were invited to have Otterbein creative writing students visit their classrooms in winter or spring quarter as part of the Creative Literacy Alliance Residencies.
Relationship to the Curriculum
This class was a natural extension of the efforts of the Otterbein College English department to help the creative-writing majors get experience teaching in the community. What we found during last year's CLA grant period was that it was most beneficial if the students could collaborate with teachers who had a working understanding of what creative writing is all about.
We also found that poetry was the genre most suited to the students' skills, as it is generally short and particular concepts can be conveyed within single lessons. In addition, many teachers seemed to have little understanding of what contemporary poetry is all about. By helping teachers gain a greater appreciation for the inner workings of poetry, we hope that they will be better able to not only make use of it in their classrooms, as described above, but also be better able to interact with our students when they visit the teachers' classrooms.
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